


Then leaf subsides to leaf

by Kylian



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Harry Potter is a Horcrux, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27342961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kylian/pseuds/Kylian
Summary: Harry is tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of wondering whether this day or the next will be his last. He is tired of changing who he is on other people's whims. But most of all? Harry is tired of fighting a war with his very own Soul.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 1
Kudos: 24





	Then leaf subsides to leaf

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Robert Frost's poem _Nothing Gold Can Stay_.
> 
> I have nothing to say in my defense. There's plenty I'd like to say here, but I haven't slept in over 80 hrs and so. Well. I'll hopefully be more coherent later.
> 
> All that aside, I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Ky

Sometimes he thinks it ought to be easier to hate.

He knows that he is supposed to hate Lord Voldemort, supposed to loathe and despise and seek justice in the form of his head on a spike for all the various atrocities he is responsible for, (many of those against Harry himself). He knows this, truly. In a way he thinks he even does hate, but then when he tries to examine the emotion, pulling its threads close back to their origin, it slips away like sand through an hourglass. 

It is a nebulous half-formed thing, that hatred. Harry has spent years trying not to consider why, but here he sits in a cushy armchair in front of the last dying embers in the Gryffindor Common Room fireplace. He stares without seeing at the still-bleeding ridges and lines of the letters he's spent the evening carving into his own skin at the behest of a horrible pink toad. He relaxes into the unnatural numbness set deep into his soul; and thinks he might've finally pinned the feeling down.

Harry is hardly a philosopher, but he thinks he might have cobbled together the words to express his strange, conflicting emotions: it's a borrowed hatred. 

For as long as he has been a part of this magical world, with its brilliant fever dream-bright lights and wondrous trivialities, he has been told by friend and foe alike, and neutral observers besides, that Harry Potter - "Wizarding Saviour", "Magical Marvel", "The-Boy-Who-Lived" - hates Lord Voldemort, cackling evil-doer that he is, and always will.

In a moment of bizarre, half hysterical, post-midnight contemplation, Harry wishes that Lord Voldemort had never come after him in Godric's Hollow that Samhain night, even if it would've meant a capital 'd' Darker future for Magical Britain. It is a selfish wish, but there is something aching within him that does not care. He feels as though something has been stolen from him - what, he does not know. In its place is this odd, foreign hatred that he desperately wishes to claim ownership of, but which, Godric help him, he cannot.

Hatred, much like revenge, is an utterly useless thing to have, but at least revenge offers a visceral satisfaction in the moment of a debt reclaimed. Hatred does not even have that much to offer. He can picture it so clearly in his mind's eye; years spent stewing in a directionless rage. Day after day doing nothing but hating, with not a whit to show for it except a higher blood pressure and wasted time.

He thinks it ought to be easier to hate, but then again, perhaps not. No matter how he wishes it were not so, he understands too much of the Dark Lord to truly hate him. He has allowed himself empathy where there should only have been antipathy, and now he cannot change what has been done.

There is not much to hate in a parasite barely clinging to the mimicry of life. Nothing loathsome in a memory of a boy playing at being untouchable because, if you're far enough above, sticks and stones can't hurt you. He fears the snakeskin monstrosity that rose from a cauldron in Little Hangleton - he would be a fool not to, with the memory of the Cruciatus Curse still singing in his bones - but, too, he has never felt more alive than he did in that graveyard.

Beyond that, they are too much alike, too much the same to really hate one another in the way people say Harry ought to hate Lord Voldemort. They had both forgotten to learn to be human, or perhaps were not properly taught. Somewhere along the way Voldemort stopped trying. Harry doesn't even blame him. It is tiring constantly changing oneself for other people, and what is so great about humanity anyways? 

So no, Harry doesn't hate Voldemort at all. There is an old anger, a hollow filled with ringing silence that has been there for as long as he can recall. Perhaps it was once shaped like hate, but he is too tired for that now. He is too alone, even among those who call themselves his friends and family, because he cannot drum up nearly as much rage for Voldemort as he can for Albus Dumbledore. At least Tom Riddle does not cloak his monstrosities in the ever-reaching shadow of the Greater Good.

Voldemort may have killed his parents, but Dumbledore was the one to take him from the arms of his guardian and leave him on his abusers' stoop like an unwanted trash heap in the dead of that brisk November night.

There is a dichotomy between Harry Potter - The-Boy-Who-Didn't-Fucking-Die, Gryffindor Golden Boy, Saviour, Hero, Symbol of the Light - and the Harry who sits here now, musing on the kind of things that might have made him into a monster. Maybe that's it - what they stole. His name is not his anymore, if it ever really was. He has been pushed and pulled every which way until he longed for the dark, dusty safety of his cupboard, where his name did not matter to him except in that he had one and it was _his_. His to whisper in the dead of night. His to hold close and precious to his chest, curled protectively around his hardened heart when his relatives called him _boy_ or _freak_. How pathetic does that make him?

He wonders for the first time whether the boy who became Lord Voldemort changed his name because he couldn't stand the sound of it, the shape of it on his classmates' lips without hiding a cringe behind his perfect Slytherin mask; without being reminded of all that he wasn't. Could Harry ever be free of 'the Boy-Who-Lived'? 

He can't even find it within himself to feel guilty anymore. He never wanted any of this, and he especially did not want to be a monument. And he is that. He catches himself thinking it with increasing frequency over the next few days. A monument or a memorial, just like the house in Godric's Hollow that the Ministry claimed - _stole_ \- with its hundred thousand candles burning at the gate. That is what these magicians see him as. 

A piece of public property to gawk at.

He can see it in the way they talk about him, and wonders how he ever missed it. The tightrope wire he was forced onto at eleven that stings his feet and sets his heart thumping. To one side is the Saviour, loved and revered in that way that people love their kings or absent gods. To the other is the scapegoat who fails to measure up, and sometimes he cannot breathe for the thought of falling either way.

They look at him and see only his mother's eyes and his father's hair and all the ways in which he has failed to mirror their perfection - as if someone living could ever live up to the sacrosanct goodness of long-dead heroes. For so long he had tried again and again to fade into the background where it is safe and warm and home. 

He gets it now; there is no fading into the background for a monument. A symbol. He is too much intertwined with the brewing conflict in the magical world to be anywhere other than right in the thick of it, dodging spellfire from both sides.

Sometimes he thinks that it ought to be easier to hate, but then he remembers that hate he does, just not Lord Voldemort.

He cannot help but hate the Dursleys, and it is a visceral, heart-stopping hatred that keeps him up at odd hours trying not to _scream_. He does not understand them, not even after years of quiet contemplation and blaming himself and hating and hating and _hating_ so much he thinks he could kill them or die himself from the pain of it.

He cannot help but hate the cruelty of children who fling curses and vitriol, noxious and acidic and burning without a moment's hesitation, but that hatred is a quiet one. Subtle and abstract -aimed at a concept rather than an individual.

He thinks he might even hate Dumbledore, but he isn't sure - that, too, is an undefined, undecided mess of emotion he can't parse. Sometimes he wonders whether it is his in truth, or whether he has borrowed it from Lord Voldemort, whose mind touches his in dreams and has never once lied to him with intent.

Harry does not know why it is so easy to hate Pettigrew but so hard to hate the man who has been hunting him since before he could string together multiple syllables. He wants to blame the dreams that kept him company through ten years of isolation and pain at the hands of his own blood, wants to blame the half-forgotten comfort of Parseltongue in his mind, whispering promises and assurance as he tended the garden, but when he tries to put those thoughts into words they come out sounding like lies.

It is career planning day when Harry admits to himself that he is not meant to survive this war. It's no surprise, really, but when the thought comes to him he still feels as though all the breath has been knocked out of him. He sits there, across from Professor McGonagall, gasping, as the finality of it hits him full in the chest like a bloody lorry and Umbridge hems and haws over his Head of House's shoulder.

Then he wants to laugh, because in retrospect it is _so very obvious_. He leaves before he loses control of himself, telling her he wants to be an Auror because this is what is expected of him, and he doesn't want to deal with Ron's sulking, besides. But in truth he cannot invision himself past graduating Hogwarts. Cannot picture a life where he is not running from Dark Lords and chasing after the whims of an old man who condemned him to die before he could walk.

Sirius is dead and Harry thinks he might have taken part of his godson with him. He can still feel the barest echoes of that godawful day at the Ministry of Magic ringing in his bones; in the nausea in his gut. It's there on the edges, bright and vivid, the memory of life and blood rushing with adrenaline, but he feels as though he is a ghost walking the pre-choreographed steps of his own existence.

There is not even a body to bury, nothing left behind but a disaster of a townhouse that feels like a cemetery, empty and hollow and full of dead things left in disarray. He cannot help but think that it is wrong that a man full of such life and uncontrollable energy has left so little behind him to prove that he was ever even there. It makes Harry want to curl up in a ball and die and leave this whole apathetic world behind. Want to shout from the rooftops that Sirius Black was innocent and died fighting for the future of a world that abandoned him to have his soul sucked out in the unending misery of Azkaban prison.

There is a prophecy in his ears, filling his nights with shadows and monsters and half-finished thoughts he doesn't dare to examine in the daylight hours for fear of what they might mean. His fingers itch with the need to _hurt_ , to _kill_ , to _duel_ , and the remembered euphoria of casting the Cruciatus is sweet and sickly and addictive in the back of his mind.

And still- _still_ , as though he has been cursed by the Black family madness and found his fix in nonsensical brain chemistry, he cannot _hate_.

He wants to, it is the only thing that keeps him going as the Dursleys work him like a slave and what little food he eats tastes like ash going down and acid coming up. He curses fate and the stars and _Albus fucking Dumbledore_ for making him like this, into a person being held together by the seams with a desperate, almost fanatical desire to hate Lord Voldemort. 

Hating Bellatrix is easy, if nothing else the bright red flare of an Unforgivable Curse sees to that, coming to his lips so easily he is almost afraid of himself. Hating Voldemort should be easier; in a very real way it is the Dark Lord to blame for Sirius's fall through the Veil, but the part of him that only ever comes alive when the man-murderer- _monster_ is near refuses to be swayed.

Something about the clash of bloody red and emerald green or the Phoenix song of brother wands meeting in battle sends cold fingers down his spine, the inevitability of it pressing in on him with chilling certainty.

There is a rawness to him now, a wildness that wasn't present until he was scraped out, rearranged, and stitched back together full of broken bits of himself that poke and prod and sting. He knows this, and a twisted part of the eleven-year-old boy who had been so easily led burns with the desire to let himself split open and just _give in_ , but he grits his teeth against it.

He finds himself sinking into apathy to survive the blistering pain of it, though he can't quite escape the crippling guilt that gnaws at him. Without Snape there looming over him as he tears his mind apart with the same sort of viciousness as muggle children going after a piñata, it is easier to sink into the softness of Occlumency exercises.

It's hard, hard enough to distract from the yawning pit inside of him because Occlumency, he has come to realize, is more than shields and walls and defences. It is, at its most basic - the foundations upon which all Mind Magic is built - the art of knowing the Self so completely that anything Other can be perceived and pushed out or guided.

An Occlumens cannot lie to themself. In retrospect, it puts a lot about Snape into perspective. Harry isn't sure what it says about him that he has such trouble with this first step.

Yes, he does, he just doesn't want to face it - and he must. Harry has become so used to lying to himself that it comes without thought; without effort. 

It is slow going, breaking a lifetime of habits, but go it does, and by the time his birthday comes along the seeping wound left by Sirius' loss has lost some of its immediacy. It is still there, like fire under his skin and burning in his eyes, but he no longer feels his feet slicing on the edge of the cliff.

It is mid-August when Harry notices it. It's late, but as has become routine by now when he cannot face the thought of the living nightmares come to haunt him, he has sunk into meditation. His mind is still a mess, fragmented shards of memories and fractured thoughts still strewn about the cavernous walk in the Chamber of Secrets, but it is, by now, an organized chaos.

Orbs like those in the Hall of Prophecies are gathered and shelved in makeshift drawers against the walls - those memories which he has already patched together and set aside. He remembers thinking this room frightening; dauntingly, impossibly large as a skinny, underfed twelve-year-old. Now, as a skinny, underfed teenager there is something about it which murmurs _home_ and _safe_ in the welcoming stretch of shadows and rising pillars.

It is mid-August, sitting - inexplicably - in Salazar Slytherin's mouth where the basilisk had emerged, old and hungry and full of Magic so ancient Harry had felt its presence down to his core; its death to the ache in his teeth, that Harry finds what he hadn't even known he's been looking for.

There is a child. Young - perhaps five or six and just as underfed as Harry had been at that age - and with pale eyes, one red the other stone-grey. His skin is light, almost translucent but for the occasional puckered pink of newly-healing scars, and bruises which match those on Harry's waking body down to the handprint on his wrist. 

His hair is dark and has a soft wave to it that looks just a touch ruffled, and his clothes hang off of him but they are well taken care of, clean and pressed and patched with aching care.

Harry recognizes him, recognizes the proud jut of his chin and eerily sharp gaze, and almost rouses himself from his meditation from the shock of it. Because here, sitting in his mindscape with the ease of a long-time resident, is Tom Marvolo Riddle.

It shouldn't be possible. It shouldn't _be_. Period. Harry Potter is in his room at Number 4 Privet Drive in bloody _Surrey_ , and the Dark Lord Voldemort is… not. And yet, when he examines the boy in front of him, fascinated, his meager Occlumency scan brushes right past him. There is not even an inkling of Other, despite all sense and reason saying otherwise.

He feels a bit like he's stumbled into some horrible dream, what was only a moment ago steady, solid ground now writhing beneath his feet like a living thing and the sky fallen cataclysmically upon the earth. What was up is down, left is right, what is isn't. And yet nothing has changed at all, not even Harry.

The boy before him tilts his head, studying him, and yet even that doesn't feel new or wrong or odd. In fact, when Tom Riddle smiles, a small, sharp thing that nonetheless conveys faint approval, Harry only feels vaguely warmed, pleased by the tacit recognition. 

_Part of the landscape_ , he thinks distantly, and suddenly something clicks into place. Behind him he can hear the chiming clink of millions of slivers of quartz sealing back together as something deep within him settles. Mismatched eyes meet green and there- _there_ is the Other and it is endless and unfathomable and Harry _cannot look away_.

Flashes of memories, choppy and frayed around the edges like an old muggle film, black and white and grey, pass before him.

There is a boy - Tom Riddle, young and cold and with hard grey eyes - snarling and biting back or cowering away from hateful, cruel children who think him too quiet, too different, too frightening-

A man stands before him in robes so vibrant they hurt to look at, wariness and distrust in eyes he somehow knows are blue. Desperate, thready hope. Harry knows this hope, recognizes it within himself though it has been a long time since he felt it; a mirror of when a giant man had burst through the door of the hut on the rock on the sea. A burning wardrobe dousing it before it even fully forms-

The Hat shouts " _SLYTHERIN!_ " And it is a commendation, a condemnation, a nail in a fabricated coffin-

Sirens and incandescent destruction, screams so loud they follow him down behind the metal door of the shelter. Bloodied and broken; mangled bodies burning in the fires; smoke so thick it wraps around his throat, a sooty, uncaring constrictor's lethal grip-

A genealogy book that shakes in his hands, a chip on his shoulder, eyes follow his every move and something in him, feral and terrified rears up, hackles raised. Magic is a living thing, a force of nature around him and he knows it's uncontrolled, a maelstrom of pure, undiluted Darkness that crackles at his fingertips, that its siren song is screaming out for all to hear, but they're sending him back and he cannot- _will_ not live with that fear again. He will not survive it.

A serpent, a girl ( _so much blood, this wasn't what I wanted_ ), a diary, a spider. They pass by so quickly Harry barely understands what he is seeing.

The flashes speed up, gaining force like built up momentum and by the time the flash of green light and unhinged laughter play out, nursery walls crumpling like tissue paper under the onslaught, there is such pressure in his head he cannot stand it. There is a brilliant light and - like coming home after years spent on the run - colour saturates the world.

Harry opens his eyes in his bedroom with its catflap and seven locks on the outside of the door and ratty blankets twisted up around him. He opens his eyes breathing heavily, wildly, like he's just run a mile from Dudley and his gang playing 'Harry Hunting', lithe muscles burning beneath clammy skin. His scar lances with pain, and when he reaches up to touch it, his hand comes away slick and red. 

The image of the Riddle in his head - _Horcrux_ , the influx of information supplies - swims before his eyes, and Harry opens his mouth to curse, shock still a living thing in his veins, but high, reedy, hysterical laughter comes out instead. 

He sits there in his sweat-soaked nightclothes, carrying a piece of the Dark Lord's soul which has comforted him in the dark before he learned that darkness was nothing to fear; which has whispered sweet nothings to him as he licked his wounds or cried himself to sleep, and laughs and laughs and _laughs_ until he cannot laugh any longer. Until there are tears streaming down his face like salty blood from an open wound and his muscles burn from the strain. He laughs until there is blood on his hands from nails like daggers pressing into slightly calloused flesh. He laughs until he starts to sob and buries his face in his pillow so as not to wake his charming relatives, and even still he shakes with it.

_Sometimes he thinks it ought to be easier to hate, but then again…_

It is a long time before he falls asleep.


End file.
